Jennifer Grant Haworth

Doctoral Student Attrition and Persistence: A Meta-Synthesis of Research

College mission statements continue to refer to purposes that include a moral dimension, such as preparation for citizenship, civic engagement, character development, moral leadership, service to society, and responsible participation in a diverse democracy. Embedded within these calls for attention to the moral and ethical dimensions of education is the assumption that colleges and universities are wellpositioned to serve these purposes and that they provide educational experiences for students to develop their moral capacities. In this chapter, we provide a theoretical overview of moral reasoning and how it develops, describe how the Defining Issues Test has been used to assess the development of moral reasoning in college students, and develop an organizational taxonomy for understanding how student characteristics, collegiate environments, and related collegiate outcomes inform our understanding of moral reasoning as a collegiate outcome.

Doctoral Student Learning and Development: A Shared Responsibility

Historically, student affairs professionals focused their work almost exclusively on undergraduate students. Doctoral faculty remained focused on the comprehensive needs of doctoral students. However, this situation is changing. Due largely to growth in numbers and diversity of graduate students, student affairs professionals at colleges and universities across the country are increasingly redefining their visions and their roles to include graduate students, including doctoral students. This research study focuses on the roles currently held by faculty in four fields of doctoral study (clinical psychology, nursing, educational administration, and electrical and computer engineering) at 12 universities in order to illuminate the comprehensive nature of the work currently being done by doctoral faculty. Interviews were conducted with 128 doctoral faculty, students, administrators, alumni, and employers. Findings detail the roles and responsibilities of faculty in four thematic areas: (1) scholarly activity and research productivity, (2) advising and mentoring, (3) selection and retention of students, and (4)defining and shaping of program culture. The findings from this study provide information that may be useful to student affairs professionals who plan to include doctoral students in their purview and who seek to better understand the work of doctoral faculty as they move in that direction.

Whassup? A Glimpse Into the Attitudes and Beliefs of the Millennial Generation

The purpose of this exploratory study was to identify and describe the attitudes and beliefs held by individuals at the front-end of the millennial generation (high school students, primarily 16-18 years old). Specifically, this study sought to develop a preliminary understanding of how 75 members of the millennial generation made sense of their own and their peers’ attitudes toward religion, family, education, work, community service, politics, and their future.

COMMUNITY COLLEGE LEARNING AND TEACHING (CCLT): A PREPARING FUTURE FACULTY PROGRAM INTENTIONALLY FOCUSED ON THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE CONTEXT

Over the next five to ten years, it is projected that well over one-half of all tenured full-time faculty at several Chicago-area community colleges will retire. This local trend reflects broader national trends in the graying of the professoriate, particularly within community colleges. In light of growing concerns among community college presidents and others about pending retirements and the availability of a new generation of well-qualified faculty, an unrivaled window of opportunity exists to develop a cohort of learning-centered future faculty. While community colleges are often heralded as ‘‘teaching colleges,’’ concerns remain about the quality of teaching and learning in community college classrooms. Furthermore, these concerns become more critical when one considers the lack of emphasis placed on the initial preparation and ongoing development of community college faculty as teachers. Not a single Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program, for instance, exists nationally that is intentionally focused on the preparation of future community college faculty. Recognizing the need to provide formal preparation for community college teachers, Loyola University Chicago has partnered with the City Colleges of Chicago to launch a graduate certificate program in Community College Learning and Teaching (CCLT) to meet the

The Misrepresentation of Generation X

Slackers. Self-centered individualists. Whining crybabies. Are these images of todays twentysomethings accurate? No, says the author. Pointing to recent research, she reveals the reality behind the image.

On Call: An Institutional Initiative to Explore Students' Understandings of and Responses to Vocation

Who among us has not, at one time or another, asked ourselves these questions? For many students, these questions persist throughout their college years as they seek to explore, identify, and clarify what they want to do with the remainder of their adult lives. Students’ responses to these questions vary widely: some let their parents answer them, others respond more to the promise of financial and social rewards than to the questions themselves, and still others chose to ignore the questions altogether. Some college students, however, take these questions seriously, trying, in the words of St. Ignatius Loyola, to remember that “only one thing is important - to seek and find what God calls me to at this point in life.” These students - however rare or common - are interested in understanding and following their calling or vocation, what Frederick Buechner (1973) has defined as “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”